European Chapter meets in Madrid; Winter Conference focuses on benchmarking, Tony Maggiore receives chapter award.

Benchmarking and Managing the Tax Function was the subject of the two-day winter conference held by TEI's European Chapter at the Hotel Villa Magna in Madrid. Nearly 100 TEI members and guests attended the February 2-3 program, which was hosted by Ignacio Longarte of Hewlett-Packard Company and featured speakers from Deloitte & Touche's European offices.

Chapter president Mark Gyorog of Gemplus Management and Trading opened the conference with an update on recent chapter activities. TEI Vice President-Region IX Anthony Maggiore and TEI General Counsel Mary Lou Fahey provided reports on proposed organizational changes within the Institute and on the Institute's 2006 membership initiative. Carol A. Schapira of Shell International Exploration and Production BV presented the results of a chapter survey. An update on Spanish transfer pricing rules by Mr. Longarte and a member roundtable completed the chapter meeting portion of the program.

The technical program featured sessions on global trends in the tax department, analyzing a company's effective tax rate, and tax key performance indicators. In a session on an investor's view of the tax function, Rob Lake of Henderson Global Investments reported on a recent survey of U.K. companies on the amount of boardlevel attention given to tax issues. He explained that although tax is a normal risk management issue, it has not received sufficient "strategic board attention," concluding that company boards need to better understand tax...